


Quit Befriending The Experiments

by providing_leverage



Category: The Mechanisms (Band), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Crossover, M/M, Multi, Raphaella doing science, implied poly Mechs, ivy and Raphaella are totally dating because I love them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-05
Updated: 2020-12-05
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:13:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27899671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/providing_leverage/pseuds/providing_leverage
Summary: Nicky has been held captive many times in his long life, but never by anyone as strange as Merrick's four person lab team
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, The Mechanisms - Relationship
Comments: 8
Kudos: 52





	Quit Befriending The Experiments

"You will not be able to give him what he wants." Nicky tells the doctor bottling a sample she'd just taken from him.

She doesn't look up from her work. "You don't know that for sure."

"Why are you doing this?" He asks, though he knows how she'll respond. Nicky had seen this, or similar enough, too many times to count. Had heard the excuse 'for the greater good' a thousand times and none of-

"Because I'm curious."

That- that's not what he's expecting and the doctor must be able to tell. "Were you expecting the same spiel my employer gave? That we're here to help people and that we're going to save lives with the information we gather from you?" She shakes her head. "No. Merrick is doing this for money and fame, no matter what he pretends. I am here because you and your team cannot stay dead and that is interesting."

In the next bed, Joe wakes with a gasp and a little jerk. The strange doctor is quickly forgotten in favor of check-in on him. 

* * *

Nicky has been held captive many times in his long life, but never by anyone as strange as Merrick's four person lab team. Nicky counts Tim as a part of the lab crew because while he wore a guard's uniform, he was undoubtedly a part of Raphaella's team. He was the only guard the doctor let stay.

They all addressed each other by their first names and talked in in-jokes. With the exception of Raphaella, who was only interested in Joe and Nicky as specimens, the lab team talked to them like they were new friends.

Tim wanted to hear about their favorite weapons. How war had evolved in the centuries they'd lived, what their top ten wars were, their first death, their favorite ways to die.

The other doctor, Marius Von Raum, was the strangest of the crew. He never helped with the work, just sat in his chair and spun in circles. When not humming to himself or working on his monstrosity of a knitting project, he's goading others into debates.

Joe is all too happy to oblige the doctor and they go in heated circles for minutes at a time on the strangest topics, Marius grinning the whole time.

Ivy mostly sits in her corner desk reading, occasionally getting up to help Raphaella with something. When she talks to Nicky and Joe it's to ask for stories. True or false, she doesn't care.

It's Ivy who figures out the two of them are together, which the rest of the crew is delighted by. Even Raphaella outs away her vials and scalpels for a bit in exchange for their love story.

Perhaps they shouldn't be telling their captives this, but neither Joe or Nicky could ever resist telling it. There were so few opportunities, after all.

"I'm not sure which part is more romantic." Tim says, "Falling in love with your mortal enemy or being bound together for eternity. Do you kill each other when you're annoyed with the other too?"

Joe frowns. "Too?"

The door bursts open, admitting that weasel Merrick and a group of guards gripping Andy and Booker. Things happen very quickly after that and Nicky's not sure if he's more shocked by the revelation that Andy is now mortal or that Booker is the reason all of this is happening.

They manage to keep collected while Merrick is in the room, through his sneering speech and threats. Marius actually breaks into applause when Nicky tells Merrick his time is coming too.

The CEO furiously stalks out, barking "I expect results." at Raphaella. He takes his guards with him.

"This seems like a personal issue." Tim says over Joe's shouts. "We'll leave you to deal with it. Besides it is almost our lunch break."

The three of them file out, leaving Raphaella to tend to Andy's wound. Their leader remains silent even as Joe and Booker continue to trade barbs. They're still arguing when Nile bursts into the room with trouble on her tail.

Nicky's not sad about the doctor taking a bullet to the chest, but it doesn't fill him with the same satisfaction as seeing Merrick or his brutish head of security, Keane, die will.

* * *

The bar is a familiar haunt, one everyone but Nile had been to at one point or another. Nicky had last visited it right after World War Two.

Booker refills his flask before he's banished to the porch while the rest of them debate his fate.

Joe is arguing two hundred years with no contact when the end table chair is pulled back with a scrape of wood against floorboards and a person slides gracefully into it.

A familiar person, one Nicky had seen dead not two hours ago.

Nile recognizes her too. "You. I killed you."

"You did." Raphaella agrees. "Quite sloppily at that. Took three minutes for me to bleed out. You would be the new one then? Fascinating."

Nicky hears the click of Andy's gun under the table. "How'd you find us?"

"I put trackers in them." Raphaella nods to Joe and Nicky. "I did not come all the way here to lose my data because of one little bloodbath."

They all tense for a fight. Raphaella may somehow also be immortal but she's not like them and she's certainly not to be trusted. 

"Relax. I am not here for a fight. One you four, unused to fighting others who cannot die and with your concern for civilian casualties, would not win." The doctor shakes her head. "No, I come with a solution to your problems. You have a man you do not trust who wishes to die. I have a ship with a much better laboratory that is no stranger to immortality, and a crew that regularly slaughters each other. He will fit in nicely."

"That would be Booker's choice to make." Andy says while Nicky remembers Tim's words from earlier.

"Do you kill each other when you're annoyed with the other too?"

Was Tim immortal? Marius and Ivy as well?

They all have a lot more questions of course, but Raphaella waves them all off. She sets what looks like a very sleek cellphone on the table. "This can be used to contact our ship, the Aurora. I will make my proposition to your man and if he accepts, we will take him. If he lives and if he wishes, we will drop him here at the end of his banishment from your little army."

Without another word she rises and walks out towards where Booker waits, oblivious to what's about to happen to him. Nicky doesn't stand up and demand that she remove the trackers inside him and his beloved, doesn't ask how there could be so many other immortals they don't know about, doesn't question this strange communication device. He lets her go.

As she does, three people rise from a corner table. No longer dressed in lab coats or a guard uniform, they're still unmistakably Tim, Marius, and Ivy.

Marius walks backwards out the door, throwing them a salute. His hand which had been covered by rubber gloves earlier glints in the sunlight.

Ivy doesn't bother to glance up from her book as she exits.

Tim heads towards their table, stopping right behind the chair Raphaella had just vacated. He's got a guitar case slung over his shoulder that could actually contain an instrument or a weapon of some kind. 

"Good, she gave you a communicator. You two," he points to Joe and Nicky, "give me a call. I want to hear more about your love story. I feel a song coming. As interesting as this little group is, perhaps a full album." 

Before they can figure out what that is supposed to mean, Tim points to Nile. "And you. Say hi to my younger self in a few hundred years, Captain Organa."

And then he too is strolling out the door into a sunny afternoon, leaving three ancient and one new immortals more confused than they've been in a good long while.

**Author's Note:**

> Yes I am implying that Nile was there in gtvstmk and she used the name Leia Organa because she's a nerd


End file.
